


additive properties

by marchpanes



Category: Warchild Series - Karin Lowachee
Genre: Gen, POV First Person, Post-Canon, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 05:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5527928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marchpanes/pseuds/marchpanes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It’s dark of me, I guess, to be so glad that the language of his past is moribund. The same way I’m glad to be alone with him again.</i>
</p><p><i>I'm too preoccupied with gains and losses.</i>
</p>
<p>Niko finally gives Jos that tattoo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	additive properties

**Author's Note:**

> for allie! merry warchild christmas! <3 i'm sorry it's not as fluffy as it should've been, or anywhere near as good as yours. i hope you like it, though.

There’s no one in the house with us. I forgot what it’s like to be alone with him. Now I remember: overwhelming.

It’s afternoon, where that word actually means something. The doors and windows are open, and the air is hot and thick with sunbeams and the buzz of lazy insects. _Warmth_ and _light_ aren’t independent concepts on a planet. I remember that, now, too.

There should be other people in this home, but it’s just us now. Just his. Mine too, he offered, and I want to say yes so bad it hurts. Instead I say, it’s not like either of us will spend time here, Niko-dan.

Today we will, he says, and sits beside me.

I remember this: the painful, special weight of his attention. I should resent it, because I know how ruined losing it will make me. But I’m no better than when I was a kid. Life will go on, beyond this room, and the smells of sun-warmed lacquer and root tea. Duty and obligation will wrench us separately back up into space, and the only difference this time will be that I’ve had practice with how much it hurts.

I know the specifics of how I will lose him, and how I will find him again.

This morning I watched him get a new tattoo across his nose. I already have it memorized, but I still stare while he stares down at me. The color is the same as the others, but fresh and dark, sharper around the edges. It represents a loss, I think. Most do. But that’s not how he’s treating it.

I don’t know how. How he can write a new identity across his face and not feel fractured. I don’t know how he paints himself in mutually exclusive words and lives them all, and never feels like he’s a contradiction.

Everyone I know writes every change into their skin. Like new beginnings aren’t just swinging back from losing what you had. Like loss isn’t subtractive.

It’s cowardly, to lie like that. It’s stupid. To pretend an object’s stronger where it’s broken.

But Niko isn’t stupid, and if someone called him cowardly, I’d kill them. So maybe it’s just me who doesn’t mend right.

“Give me your arm,” he says, too gentle. Like he can read me through my eyes. If anyone could speak whatever language I’m written in, I’d choose him. He taught me how to feel untranslated, but not illegible. A code that’s not for everyone to crack.

Him, too. I like that no one else can read his face. Even if they deciphered all the twisting, thorny letters, they couldn’t know what it really means; how all these words fit, all on this one man.

I hold out the arm that’s bare. I know what’s happening. He explained before we left _Macedon_ , and on the shuttle down to Nan’hade he answered the few questions that I had.

This morning he became the Caste Master. It’s a role he’s filled since D’antan o Anil was killed, but the word I watched one of the artist-caste tattoo across his skin makes it official. It winds perfectly around his name and his old title, like they’re stalks of a plant edging aside for a new growth.

It all seems deliberate, somehow, on his skin. Like his life has been designed from the beginning, planned aesthetically to make his face more beautiful with every loss and gain.

My face is pale and bare, and he still thinks it needs to stay that way. Maybe I do too, now. I missed my chance to take that kind of root, to grow thick letter-vines and read my _na_ in every mirror. My right arm’s marked already, anyway, with the dark silhouette of a human face and a ten-pointed star and a deep code that all claim at least part of me.

I’ve lied so long with my identity that I fumble with just a _single_ truth. So he helps me learn sustainable contradiction. Like a primer to the art of believing in two opposite ideas.

Symp, Jet. Musey, S’yra’rem. I am a shelf of only bookends.

He gives me something new to call myself.

My _Macedon_ star was about as much hassle as an injet. Not many ships still do tattoos with electric needles. It’s less uniform, too time-consuming, too easy to make mess up with the code. And more painful, though I doubt you’d find a deep space captain who would care. It’s just old tech. They don’t use it up on ship. And neither do they down here in Nan’hade.

Down here, they use dye and string and bone.

Niko threads an ivory needle and dips it through the _yenn_ ash from our morning tea. He holds it up against the reddening light of late afternoon, and I watch the sinew twist and shed brief puffs pigment in fine, dark clouds.

He holds the back of my neck before he starts, thumb soothing at my hairline, and murmurs things that make me close my eyes. After that I barely feel the pain at all.

 _Kii’redan-na,_ he writes. A twining, thorny word around my other wrist.

It’s a new word to describe me. Not to replace my old ones, but to collect them all. A name. A rank. A _na_.

It’s what his brother was.

I don’t replace him, either. But maybe it helps, that I exist where he once was.

When he’s done, I hold my wrists up, side by side. The symbols coexist. Not organically or beautifully, like Niko’s. They’re too different to even look deliberate, and that’s its own truth. But they’re approximately equal, and they’re balanced, and neither makes the other disappear.

“I’m proud of you, s’yta-na.” He presses his thumb into my palm. My wrist aches when I flex my fingers. It’s a good pain. It has meaning. Language, where I used to be blank.

“When do we have to go back?” I ask, instead of all the other things I could say.

“Not today,” he says. He unwinds a strip of clean cloth and tugs me closer, gently, by my hand. The day is almost over. But I don’t say that, either.

I close my eyes, and let him wrap me up so I can heal.


End file.
